Review Summary: When the tagline of the band's MySpace page is "poop balls", you pretty much know what to expect...
For a band that started off as a joke, See You Next Tuesday (or C.U.N.T. for those of you that have yet to get the acronymical joke) have done surprisingly well for themselves. Since their formation, they have been signed to Ferret Music, and also enjoyed moderate, and arguably undeserved, success with their debut release, Parasite. To the untrained ear, Parasite probably seemed like your average grind record, but those who dug a little deeper realized that it was really more of an "experimental" metalcore record that tried as hard as it could to be grind. All the tempo changes, blast-beats, death growls, short song lengths, and "shred" in the world still couldn't hide the band's penchant for breakdowns and other metalcore tendencies. After Parasite, the band had a few choices to make about the direction the new album should take. For many grind bands, the next "logical" step always seems to be to make everything faster, heavier, more technical, and, of course, more brutal. However, since the band draws a lot from metalcore, they could just as easily play up the "core" side of things and added even more breakdowns. In short, the band decided to try and go both directions at once, so the album really ends up being even more of an incoherent mess than their debut.
As far as the flow of the album goes, there really isn't one. The songs here are either made up of an abundance of obscenely short grind passages that are haphazardly thrown together with seemingly little thought, or they gravitate heavily to the metalcore side of the spectrum, like the ridiculously boring 3 minute chugfest that is Dedication to a New Era. However, there are a few moments that are fairly enjoyable and interesting (even if its accidentally). The oddly placed pinch harmonics and other assorted guitar noises in songs such as She Once Said I Was Romantic do serve to make things at least slightly more interesting, but after two or three listens they just become yet another noise in the oppressively dense soundscape, which brings us to yet another one of the albums faults. Whereas on Parasites there were at least moments of high technicality to be enjoyed, the technical "riffing" and rapid-fire drumming on this album will go largely unnoticed, as the guitars and drums just blend into a solid mass of churning and muffled sounds. Basically the musical aspects are
extremely hit or miss, which isn't helped by the fact that the misses constitute a good 90% of the album, and the hits barely catch the outside of the target.
So do the vocals do anything to make up for the rest of the album at all? Sadly, not really. Even though the vocalist does cover everything from high pitched shrieks to vomiting low growls, he doesn't really pull anything off in an impressive manner. To be perfectly honest, the vocal performances, as well as the lyrics, are every bit as lackluster and underwhelming as the rest of the album is. The lyrics for almost every song (even the ones that are over 2 minutes in length) consist of a few sentences at most, which are often repeated over and again, which wouldn't be so bad if the lyrics themselves weren't awful. For example, "F*ck you. Every one of you. In my heart, you're all dead" makes up the entirety of the lyrics presented in Dedication to a New Era, and to be honest, that's more or less a highlight.
Simply put, if you like rambling, incoherent, and noisy metalcore-based grind with sub-par songwriting, vocals, and production, then you will probably wet yourself over this album. Even with the few (and I mean
few) moderately decent points, the album still barely manages to be enjoyable.
Pros
-Umm...there are a couple of mildly interesting guitar and drum parts?
-Vocals have improved
slightly
Cons
-Almost every song is a jumbled up/incoherent mess
-Even if the musicianship was astounding, the ridiculously muddy wall of noise approach masks a lot of it
-Lyrics are often atrocious and manage to be that way in under three sentences
-Even the jocular nature of the first album (which at least made some of song titles worthy of a few giggles) seems to be all but gone
Recommended Tracks
-She Once Said I Was Romantic...I mean even if you think its terrible you will have only wasted 1:08 of your life
Writers Note: This might be a bit unnecessary but I feel like this needs to be said (and eh its my review so what the heck). As I sit here, enjoying my haphazardly thrown together (yet delicious) cheeseburger from Wendy's, I can't help but think that more effort was put into said burger than was put into the making of this album by SYNT. Basically, this album is the equivalent of a carelessly prepared cheeseburger, except the cheeseburger is more or less uncooked and tastes like crap for the most part...
